Open problems: Process isolation.
In practice, a common response to Spectre attacks has been to move all secret
data into a separate process—e.g., Chrome isolates different sites in
separate processes [1]}.
This shifts the burden to OS engineers from application and runtime system
engineers.
Developing Spectre foundations to model the process abstraction would
elucidate the security guarantees of such systems.
This would be especially useful since there is evidence showing that the
process boundary does not keep an attacker from performing out-of-place
training of the conditional branch predictor, or from leaking secrets via the
cache state [2]}.
